Now
you should pay attention to meditation in words and compare them to your own
experiences. You have been retreating now for more than sixteen days, and you
encounter experiences, like images - what we call mental images - as a result
from a certain concentration. Even mindfulness, strong mindfulness is also the
result from the practice of this kind of vipassanā meditation retreat. Or sometimes confidence, faith or trust. All this is
happening with your experiences.

All
this is good, but when these things are too extreme they can be the cause of
your failure. This means you are getting nowhere, because you're attached to
the experience you have got from your practice.

Then
you carry your self with it. I mean the personal entity, that
you believe in your self, is becoming strong with this retreating.

That's
why we always have to get back to the vipassanā characteristics. Impermanence (anicca),
suffering (dukkha)
and egoless ness or no-self (anatta). You have to keep strict to these three
characteristics. If you did not experience these three things in your practice,
you're out of vipassanā.

Maybe
you practised something else. You can mislead yourself and do samatha practice
(concentration meditation). You need concentration all the time during the
retreat. Without it you cannot do your work, you cannot make a move, because
the concentration itself is a resource of all this moving, of all this going in
your retreating, so you need concentration anyway.

You
should understand that we have three kinds of concentration. Before I go
further I want you to see in what concentration you are.

For
those who were listening to this before, maybe it is the same story, the same
thing, but it is always new because it's here and now, and so it is different.

First
of all we should know that in this kind of practicewe have khanika-samādhi. I mean momentary
concentration - you have it all the time.

When you make an attempt to do the noting or naming - that attempt is
motivation. We call it samma-vāyāma, right effort - it
has to be right, not wrong.

How
do you know that it is right effort? It's coming together with right
recognition. Recognising the right object at the right time.
With recognition of the object mindfulness arises at the same time.

The
note or the name that you put on the object you are recognising is samma-samādhi or
momentary concentration.

So when you have a new object coming up every time because of change -
again I come back to change, because when practising meditation with vipassanā you
have to be with the change all the time.
Because of the change there is also suffering and missing for your ego or for
your self. Or sometimes there is the fear that it will change.

When
you see or recognise the change, you recognise suffering at the same time,
because it makes things insecure for you. We have this insecurity in our life
all the time.

It's
not remaining, it's insubstantial, it's not real because of change, and in this
change you suffer. You don't recognise anything permanent in or about you,
especially not in your attachment.

This
happens a lot in your experiences. I said: it is very good for those who
practise an intensive course like this to see all this, to experience all this.
But your personal ego, your self, the belief in your self, what we call sakkaya-ditthi,
is not yet removed.

Therefore
it is causing you a lot of problems all the time here in this retreat. You are
not happy. May be you understand, but you understand only. Being here in the
retreat is also suffering for you. Many times you have the idea to stop or to
leave the retreat. But many times you are indecisive - that's also suffering.

This
is happening with vipassanā
meditation. If this isn't happening, it's not true practice, not a true
retreat, not discovering the suffering and you fail to obtain wisdom.

Before
I go further with vipassanā
experiences I want to go back to the concentration.

If
you practise momentary concentration, you don't get mental images. During
today's interviews I discovered that many meditators
here encounter mental images. That means that you are very deeply involved in
your concentration. It's going to the second degree of concentration, the
so-called upacāra-samādhi,
approaching concentration.

The
first was khanika-samādhi,
that you can follow the object, every time on time. And sometimes you easily
recognise, and you name and note with words.

But
when you have approaching concentration, deep concentration, you get deep
feelings in yourself. When you have deep feelings in yourself, you illustrate
or manifest this as a mental image.

Like
sometimes your body is jerking or jumping (or it feels as if it is jumping), or
your body or your head feel as if they’re growing. Certain meditators
encounter numbing, so that you don't feel your arms, one arm sometimes,
sometimes both arms, or you don't feel your legs. All these experiences are
saying that you have approaching concentration, the second degree of concentration.

And
then you get many contrasts. Especially with noise. If
somebody suddenly moves in your neighbourhood or makes a hard noise, you easily
tremble physically or your heart beats quickly, that happens many times.

Or
sometimes you stop your sitting meditation and you want to get up to do your
standing and walking meditation, you feel contracting in your heart, like heart
beat. That means you are involved in concentration in the feeling in your self,
what is called upacāra-samādhi,
approaching concentration.

It
can happen that sometimes when you sit - you got purification of mind through
the purification of your discipline - you can sit for a long time without pain,
without feeling. Or sometimes the rising and falling of your stomach doesn't
appear at all. You just recognise your body sitting, without thought, without
pain, without feeling - like a stone or like a statue. You see yourself as a
Buddha statue for example or as a statue of a man. This is a characteristic of
full concentration. In Pali we call this appanā-samādhi.

First
there is khanika-samādhi which we use to practise
with noting or naming. The second is upacāra-samādhi which sometimes makes you confused,
especially confused with perception. It is hard to use your orientation to note
or to name.

But
full concentration means that you finished. There is nothing to do - there's
just awareness of your sitting position.

This
can happen if you feel very pleasant. It is enjoyable and you feel rapture.
That is also a characteristic of mental absorption.

When
you mentally have that absorption in your body, there's hardly any object.
There is just awareness of one-ness. It does not happen like I have said
before. There is no sense of impermanence, no new things happen, just the same
things happen all the time. You just recognise your bodily position; there is
no suffering and also no experience of egoless ness.

You
feel your ego very deeply - you're refining your ego with that full
concentration. But it is defilement at the same time. Why is it defilement? Because it hinders your progress towards enlightenment and wisdom.

When
you can just sit and nothing happens - no pain, no thought to discover -
doesn't mean that you're enlightened. It's not the way to enlightenment.

If
you want to get back to the way of enlightenment and wisdom, you have to get
back to your suffering, to feel the pain, to feel the dissatisfactoriness,
not satisfying yourself, I mean not to satisfy your ego. It has to come back to
that again.

People
who have been longer in the retreat can do this, but beginners who just join a
retreat mostly are discontent with being here, are not very happy with being
here.

Sometimes
you got the idea that it was wrong for you to come here to the retreat. You're
criticising, that means you have no trust, no confidence in yourself. Or maybe
you go further: you have no confidence in this method, no confidence in the
teacher, no confidence in the teaching.

You
say: this is not something for me or I'm not ready for it. Some meditators leave the retreat because of that judgement. You
must be careful with that judgement. It means you underestimate everything.
Mostly you underestimate yourself. Then you will miss your opportunity.

You
miss your fortune that way, if you're criticising, if you see that you are very
new. You can look up to see who have been meditating twenty or thirty years,
and they keep practising. Someone who has been here for a long time, and they
are still doing it. You have to get the idea that it must be something,
otherwise they wouldn’t stay that long. If you have that doubt, you do not
trust your way of being here, you must look at that every time.

This
practice is not new. Gautama the Buddha has been
practising the four foundations of mindfulness more than two thousand and five
hundred years ago, the same what you are doing here. And it did not change, is
still the same thing. It has been carried on from generation to generation in
this lineage so long already.

If
it were not true, nobody would have followed it, nobody would have practised
it. We do follow, we do practise this kind of vipassanā
meditation that was discovered by Gautama Buddha
already more than two thousand five hundred years ago.

It's
still modern, it's not ancient. It's not something far away from human life.
It's very good to apply in our life, even in this time, in our civilised
society with its high technology. It is still practicable, understandable, knowledgeable.

It
doesn't matter in what religion or faith people believe. People from different
religions, different backgrounds, different beliefs - when we practise these
four foundations of mindfulness, we experience the same things as have been
experienced by Gautama Buddha two thousand and five
hundred years ago, because it is very human. This is humanism.

It
doesn't matter if you use it as a belief or not, because belief is already in
it when you have trust in your experiences. It means enlightenment or nibbāna is still
there.

Buddha
has said that this way of practising, or the Dhamma,
will never disappear from this world if mankind still practises it. He guaranteed
and announced this in his lifetime.

Therefore
we do believe. Not that we believe a dogmatic belief. We believe with trust,
with confidence, but also with good reason. Not without reasoning - reasoning
in a way that you can prove yourself in the practice of the four foundations of
mindfulness. Namely body, you have a body - Buddha had a body before he went
into nibbāna;
we have feeling - Buddha had the same. We have thought - Buddha had the same;
and we have conditioning, so-called dhammanupassanā-satipatthāna, mental conditioning or
mind-objects.

Everyone
has this, so this is reachable, understandable, knowledgeable
by mankind. Regardless of your background or what you believe in. Because we do not bring belief into this practice. We should
do it with what is coming right now. To see your body, to
observe your body, to observe your feeling, to observe your thought and to
observe your conditioning. These are the four foundations of
mindfulness. You have to establish your mindfulness on these four.

In
the SatipatthānaSutta it is
said that this is the way, the only way, for the purification of all beings -
they mean human beings - and to overcome lamenting, greed, mourning, sorrow and
suffering. This is the only way. Maybe someone can prove that there's another
way, but it is not true, because this is about what is within yourself, what you have for yourself. You have feeling, you
have thought and you have conditioning.

You
can have it from other teachers, but it has to be this way. It is the only way
to come back to yourself, to your inner.

If
you've been out of yourself you're a lunatic - let me put it that way - or it’s
an illusion. It can happen that certain people who are not yet enlightened can
obtain clear-audience or clairvoyance or can predict things in your future.

For
Buddha this is lunacy, it doesn't make any sense. You don't get out of your
problems.

Even
when you go to a fortune teller, they tell you this and that, true or not, you
do not get out of your problems. They say you're going to suffer or they even
tell you that you're going to be discontent, and maybe it's true that it
happens the way they predicted, but you're not better off. You only know it
before it happens. You have the same pain, the same sorrow, the same grief, the
same frustration.

It's
not the way to get out of your problems, there is no purification. Practising
mindfulness based on your body, based on your feeling, based on your thought,
based on your conditioning is purifying you.

Therefore
if you're hurt, you feel pain because in our lives we have previous karma, we
have done many things good and bad.

Everyone
has been with all these good and bad actions. Those recordings in you - we have
no time to look into them in daily life. Almost no time
because the change is too quick, especially in modern times.

We
have to follow everything, technology - what you call software - you are always
dependent and have to go to the window to see what's going on in the world and
have to follow it all the time. No time to come back to yourself.

You
just look through the window and you think that you know enough, but this
knowledge from the window, from the computer, doesn't make you better off.
Sometimes it gives you even more problems.

Sometimes
you're so sad because you see the news or other stories on it that make you
suffer more - and at the same time it's defiling your mind.

It's
going on and on. You can hardly move. You have to follow it. It’s almost like a
dog without a tail. Do you know a dog without a tail? He has no tail to move
anymore. It has been cut off.

Our
wisdom has been cut off by the technology. You should be careful. You may use
this, but you should understand that it can cut off your wisdom. Do not be too
much in it, but use it at the time you want.

So how to begin to get wisdom?
You must begin to look inside yourself.

Where
in yourself? Nothing more than body, feeling, thinking,
conditioning. This is what you have.

You
need time to purify this. Take your time. You must keep trying all the time,
repeatedly to obtain wisdom - so-called paññā, knowledge.

You
can obtain knowledge through three directions.

First,
while now you're hearing my words, you get knowledge too about vipassanā, about
life, but you're not enlightened.

Or
sometimes through good thoughts or sharp thinking, but you don't get
enlightened this way. You're not better off.

You
read a lot of books or you philosophise, but still you're not
free from your ego, not free from your self.

Unless
you're free from your self, you cannot be free from your suffering. If your
self is there, you are suffering. Practising vipassanā meditation in a retreat
like this is the way to overcome your suffering, but then first you have to
have experienced pain.

We
know that one day we are going to end up with dying. Death is fearful and
painful for mankind. People die with fear, they die with mourning, with
frustration, but when you meditate you discover this pain of being human first
in yourself.

You
need to have patient discipline to deal with pain, to overcome that pain.
Without patient discipline we're getting nowhere.

So
we start with sīla,
discipline, then we'll get concentration. Good discipline supports you to get
good concentration. Right concentration makes you overcome suffering in life.
Once you overcome suffering in life you are enlightened.

All
kinds of pain, all kinds of greed, all kinds of sorrow, all
kinds of sadness - you need to have patience to deal with it.

You
need concentration - I said concentration is a resource, but you don't demand
for big concentration. Momentary concentration only will help you to overcome.

When
you want to use your momentary concentration, we call that sukkha-vipasaka, it means you use vipassanā to get freedom or to get happiness in life.

It's
not a happiness you've experienced before. It's a new happiness. Happiness without self.

You
cannot imagine this, but if you talk about freedom you can imagine it, because
all of us are longing for freedom in life. You can be free from everything if
you have good management.

But
to free yourself from your self is impossible. The only way is the way of the
four foundations of mindfulness. I said to you that you can let yourself free,
but how to be free?

To
be detached from what we call the five attachments - your body, your feeling,
your perception, your mental conditioning or your mental functioning and from
your mundane consciousness - is the only way to become free and to overcome
suffering.

Therefore
in this practice we need sīla,
we need to have good senses, six senses to be able to practise sīla, discipline
- to refrain the senses.

What
do I mean with refraining the senses? Do not let your
senses mingle with the outer object.

Like
hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting with the tongue, contacting with the body
and impressing with your mind certain mind-objects, do not let your senses
mingle.

Every
time the contact comes, it's also recording ignorance for us, or illusion.

We
follow it, follow the influence. What influence?

Liking
and disliking is influencing you all the time with the senses. So you're being
tortured by your desire for contact with the senses.

If
there is good contact the desire to keep it is there, the desire to be with it
as long as your desire wants. But your desire never ends, so it keeps on
wanting.

And
with a bad contact you have the desire not to be with that. To
change or to stop it, to get rid of it or to escape from it.

So
there is always work for you because of the contacts.
Therefore we are restless. When the sense contacts are not refrained, when we
are without sīla,
we are restless. Therefore we have to purify ourselves.

Mankind
has six senses for contact of the senses, and they say they are happy. But it
is not true, it's an illusion.

They
can be happy with a sense-contact, they're happy with a good eye, a good ear, a
good mind, a good body, a good tongue, a good nose - they're happy but those
contacts of that feeling gives them attachment.

Even
not wanting to be with something is attachment, is desire to get out of
something. That you do not agree with disliking we call in Buddhist terms abhijjhā-domanassa. Abhijjhā means that you're
hankering for it; domanassa
means it's irritating you all the time.

So
we always get irritation, and it’s piercing you like a nail all the time.

This
desire – so-called bhava-tanhā
- the desire to be with and the desire to get rid of follow us all the time.
This is real suffering, but we enjoy that feeling, and then we get all that's
recorded as karma. Wanting to be, not wanting to be,
without end, endless; that's so-called samsāra.

But
in the method you are now practising, you have been guided not to care about a
lot of things. If it's good, when you say or note 'good', you're detached.
Naming 'I like it' when there is something you like is also detached.

If
there's something you dislike like pain or sorrow or worry, you name 'I worry',
'I worry' and you're detached every time. So every note, every name you put on
the object, you must not underestimate it - it's a very little thing, almost
nothing - but it's a lot because it gets you to detachment.

There
is nothing for you to belong to, not even to this practice. You have to be
detached from it. You know this all the time, when something happens, like good
concentration, good mindfulness. Sometimes you get problems with your
mindfulness, because mindfulness itself can be a defilement
for vipassanā,
because every time when you put sharp noting on the objects, they disappear
because of having good mindfulness - and then it makes you over-confident.

You
underestimate that in yourself you are recording: a good thing or a bad thing
keeps conditioning you.

Therefore
in this practice you burn your garbage. The old karma has the tendency to come
out. Sometimes you get saliva in your mouth or in your nose, sometimes you're
vomiting. That's just an illustration of the purifying process. Sometimes you
have tears. That's also an illustration of having burned your old karma,
purifying your old karma.

Sometimes
you feel more fear or sorrow in this retreat. This means that it is not new,
it's something old in you that has come out. It's
purified.

So
the old garbage has to get out. And new karma must be prevented. With all this
practice with the six senses, with the five aggregates, with the four
foundations of mindfulness, with accomplishment, you have the motivation. You're
really concerned and you perform the effort and you scrutinise all the time
your practice, without ceasing, without stopping. One day you will get a real revelation, that means freedom and the everlasting peace of nibbāna.

And
now I come to the question: Have you been enlightened in this practice, or are
you just hearing my talk or idea of philosophy?

I
want to give you an example.

When
you note your knee, you have pain at your knee. I said: first recognising your knee, that is mindfulness. And making an attempt to note,
that is right effort. When you're saying a note, this is right concentration.

You're
now stepping on the path leading to the end of your pain.

How
do you do that? You have the full attention in what you're saying, like 'pain',
'pain'. For that moment you're not with the pain. Where were you? You were with
your word. When with all attention you note the pain, and you recognise that it
is still there, you do it more times. It's purifying. Pain is becoming less, or
when it is not less it is there because of certain physical tension, but it
doesn't matter, it doesn't do you harm. At that moment you are enlightened.

So
you make a collection of your enlightenment, with all this noting or naming,
every time. Let's put it this way: in every noting and naming you are
enlightened. So if you just sit without noting and naming you're not
enlightened.

It
is very obvious that you can obtain absorption or concentration but it does not
make you enlightened.

Enlightenment
is not too far away. It's under your nose. In very breath it is there with you.
So do not underestimate your breathing. So you note the breathing, rising and
falling (that is your body character, the foundation of the body). Then you
note the pain - I want you to understand this well. If you put your attention
on your physical pain, like in your knee, pain has the power to suck you in
like a magnet. Then you're attached to it, you're not free from it.

So
you must never go too close to the spot where your pain is. Pay attention from
a certain distance - recognising it first - and make a mental note on the right
object. Be careful, if you say 'pain', 'pain' without recognising the pain you
practise mantra meditation. A mantra is leading to concentration only, without
discovering the suffering, without wisdom.

So
you have to see what is the object of your mind. I
said nāma-rūpa
in previous talks, nothing exists - only nāma-rūpa, mind and matter. The
matter that your mind is with, that is the object you should note or name.

So when you sit you observe your breathing, rising and falling, but when
pain comes you should not be with the breathing anymore. If you still try to repeat 'rising', 'falling', you practise mantra meditation.

You
have to shift your attention to recognise the spot where the pain is. Don't get
close to it. Because pain is also feeling, it is khanda, vedanā-khanda, the
aggregate of feeling. You must never get into your khanda's. Do not get into your
body, do not get into your feeling, do not get into your perception, do not get
into your mental conditioning, do not get into your
mundane consciousness.

Be
above them, because they are your ego. Once you come above your ego, above your
self, then you are enlightened. Then you are in lokuttara, you are beyond, you
are not in something. Therefore never allow yourself to get into something

When
you leave these five groups of aggregates alone, then you're very free. They'll
just be the way they are. I mean: enlightenment is just coming from these
impurities, the khandhas.
The body is not pure, feeling is not pure, perception is not pure, conditioning is not pure. The mundane consciousness that
makes you aware of this is not pure.

You
should not be concerned with that, because you practise mindfulness.

Enlightenment
is in your mindfulness, so when you have full time mindfulness you're
enlightened.

The
perfectly enlightened one like the arahant, they don't sleep because they have mindfulness all
the time. When they sleep, only their body rests. Their mindfulness is functioning.

For
sleeping you have to go into sub consciousness. But not the
perfectly enlightened one. They are above this, therefore they are in lokuttara, they are above
these mundane things, these worldly things. They are not concerned with it
anymore.

So
you are here, trying to build your mindfulness on these four foundations. Many
times, in these hours, except for the time you sleep, you are with
enlightenment. So don't underestimate that. You get freedom.

Maybe
you don't see it yet, but with more polishing, with more experiences, you will
get real wisdom and real freedom.

So
you have time now to do your retreat. You should consider yourself fortunate to
be here. And the time is running out. You had three weeks, but now there are
only two days left.

Don't
underestimate the last two days. It can be a very good, a critical time for
you. So put right effort, right mindfulness, right
concentration in your practice.

Maybe
you will experience something, or maybe something will come that will make you
enjoy this retreat for these days.

In
the sutta's it says that when you practise
from the morning till the evening you will be enlightened. Or when you begin in
the evening and you practise ardently and correctly, in the morning you are
enlightened.

The
time doesn't sound a lot, but you need time to make it correct. If you are
lucky, just lucky, you can get enlightened in one day. I hope this will happen
for you.